Auckland Gas Company - History

History

The Auckland Gas Company was formed in 1862 as the first joint stock company in New Zealand. It was also the first private services provider in Auckland. In the 1870s, the company bought and developed a large site in Freemans Bay to build a gasworks (roughly on and east of the site of the current New World supermarket), with further buildings (mainly workshops) and offices on Beaumont Street.

In the late 1960s the Kapuni gas fields were openened, providing natural gas which was cleaner and cheaper than the locally produced coal gas variant, and the company stopped producing gas and became a supplier only. This led to most of the buildings in the Freemans Bay are being demolished.

Read more about this topic:  Auckland Gas Company

Famous quotes containing the word history:

    “The history of modern art is also the history of the progressive loss of art’s audience. Art has increasingly become the concern of the artist and the bafflement of the public.”
    —Henry Geldzahler (1935–1994)

    “Yet poetry, though the last and finest result, is a natural fruit. As naturally as the oak bears an acorn, and the vine a gourd, man bears a poem, either spoken or done. It is the chief and most memorable success, for history is but a prose narrative of poetic deeds.”
    —Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)

    “It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature.”
    —Henry James (1843–1916)